Why Kyle Now Squeaks
by Wermo
Summary: This is part parody, part attempted slapstick. This is not meant to be taken seriously by any stretch. Hope you enjoy but please let me know what works with this premise and what doesn't.


Kyle returned home to Seattle from a three month medical school residency. He had barely walked in the door when both Jessi and Amanda emerged from the living room. It somewhat surprised him they were even in the same room together, remembering clearly how they had bickered over him three months previously and the three years before that.

They had been the reason he'd left. And yet, his eyes brightening at the sight of the two of them, he loved them both. He tried the diplomatic approach, to keep them on an equal footing. "Hi, it's so nice to see you both."

They both smiled as though he'd said it to just one of them. Maybe this would go better than he'd thought?

Amanda came forward and gave him a huge hug. She released him after two seconds and let Jessi have her hug with him, which not surprisingly was one tenth of one second longer than Amanda's. What Amanda wouldn't notice wouldn't hurt her.

Although he already knew the answer he kept up the pretense for Amanda's sake, since she still didn't know his full past or his abilities. "Is anyone else home?"

Jessi answered quickly, maybe a little too quickly. "No."

Amanda finished her sentence, also a little quickly, "They left to buy you a gift. They didn't know you'd be back so soon."

Jessi gazed down to her feet, "We did though…"

Now Amanda gazed at her feet but said nothing.

It was his turn to look down at his feet – how funny this memory might be if the context weren't so serious – while he fished out a ring from his pocket. He put it onto his finger. "I'm married. She'll be here in fifteen minutes in the limo. We're on our honeymoon."

Jessi stared at him curiously and Amanda just stood there, opening and closing her fists. They stayed like that for almost a whole minute before Amanda started hyperventilating. He took a step forward when she started yelling as she ran and jumped on him. He easily could have avoided her but she would have surely crumpled against the heavy oak door and probably broken a few bones.

She was barely coherent too and it took him some effort to keep her from scratching or punching him. It hurt him to see her this way. He was thankful Jessi was taking it well. If she wanted to hurt him, she probably could; they were practically equals.

"Calm down Amanda," he said over and over in a soothing voice. After a few minutes, tears still running down her cheeks, she stopped thrashing and before she said a single word, she very nearly started kissing him.

Jessi had come up and pulled her off him in a smooth motion, and said, "He's married now. Do you want to make him commit adultery?" Jessi's eyes practically bore holes into him. She wasn't pleased at all. He swallowed.

Amanda's face was beet red. She sputtered after a few failed attempts, "Adultery?" She turned her gaze from Jessi to him. She screamed, "How could you Kyle? I thought you loved me!"

With those words ringing in his ears she stormed off, leaving by the front door right behind him. With his hand he blocked a single sucker punch to his kidney.

When the door slammed shut, making things on the wall rattle just a little, Kyle smiled sheepishly to Jessi. "Wow, she's mad huh?"

Jessi's expression never changed. "It's a good thing I have more restraint than she does."

"Um, I'm sorry?" he ventured. He still loved her too; he would never lie about that.

"If you don't want to be a widow you might want to explain."

"Jessi!" He couldn't believe she was already planning to kill his wife!

"I think Amanda just might do it with a head on collision. You'd better hurry." Amanda was indeed in her car and she sped out of her driveway, tires squealing.

He dismissed that notion in its entirety. "Amanda doesn't believe in killing. Her religion is completely against it."

"And if I hadn't kept her from kissing you just now, she would have broken a pretty big rule there too." He knew the commandment which she referred to. "And what about _thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife_? Or in this case husband?" She merely blinked, seemingly emotionless. "She's either gone to confession, or will be killing herself and your wife the moment she gets here."

He saw Jessi's eyes travel to his wedding ring.

"How's married life?" she asked with a cold tone.

"Um, good?"

"I'm not going to kill you Kyle; it'll just take me time to adjust." She growled, seemingly involuntarily for she brought her hand to her mouth in apology. Kyle suspected she wasn't taking it quite as well as she made it appear.

It had been a mistake to come home, he now knew. Maybe he'd always known and that was why he'd told his wife to come after he had time to break the news. They had married in Manhattan after all, and he'd conceded to her meeting his family instead of making them feel insignificant – or downright peddlers – when compared to her family.

"What's your wife's name?" she asked.

He noticed her finger twitch. He said the name, caressing it with his tongue and lips. It flowed out like music, death metal music anyway. How he loved her name! He couldn't withhold a sigh.

Her older brother had introduced him to the underbelly of music, to loud and yet intricately complex melodies where singing was little more than rhythmic grunting or screaming to accompany the real art, the music itself. His ears started ringing; he could almost taste the music. He let it carry him, as though he were floating on the river's crazy notes.

His eyes opened suddenly. He never realized he'd lost consciousness – surely Jessi's doing – but at least he was unharmed otherwise. He strained his hearing and heard her typing in his old room at his old computer. When she yelled, "Ah ha!" it actually hurt his ears.

He walked to the living room to find out exactly how much time he'd been unconscious. Good, less than a minute was quite safe. Nonetheless, he'd have to talk to her about anger management. He was about to do just that when she came running down the hall. She obviously knew where he was from his heartbeat because she went directly to him.

She didn't even apologize! "Kyle, your wife is a famous mobster's eldest daughter."

His eyes went blank.

She waved the paper she printed in front of his eyes, breaking his concentration. His eyes quickly found a picture of his wife smiling for the media beside a front page story titled Baron's Deaf Daughter Deemed Innocent. In less than a second he read the entire article.

His heart sank. It was true. He never once noticed her entire family lying to him, yet they certainly must have! "I don't know what to say."

"You have to stay married to her Kyle or her family – the mob – will kill each and every one of us!"

His sweet once-deaf wife must have lied to him countless times. It was heart breaking.

The limo pulled up in front of the house. Vaguely he overheard an engine revving.

His wife, whom he'd found so mesmerizing and so compassionate that he'd healed her ears where repeated operations had failed – with an experimental treatment of sugar placebo taken five times a day for one week – came out of the door before Geraldo the chauffeur even got out of his door.

The revving grew and could no longer be ignored. His sweet Amanda was doing something utterly out of character.

He had no time to race to the front door. Instead he leaped through the living room window, making all eyes open wide. He called out his wife's name. Her smile turned to a frown, then fear when she saw the car barreling toward her, smashing through a flimsy fence and scattering bushes and leaves everywhere.

He had to admit that Amanda was a good driver to have kept the car locked on his wife the whole time. He reached his wife with only seconds to spare and he spent one second to stare into Amanda's eyes. They were round like saucers, as though she were blinded by bright head lights.

He jumped ten feet in the air, Amanda narrowly missing them in the process. Because she had thought she was going to smash into him, she had made one final crazy twist of the steering wheel. Since she was on grass and not pavement, she didn't immediately swerve and start rolling, then smashing into the neighbor's house, exploding into a massive fireball, heaving little chunks of Amanda all over the place. He shook the nasty thought away, like a buzzing fly. Instead the grass gave way and the front tires buckled, ripped off their axles. The car continued for another twenty feet before resting comfortably against the big tree two neighbors away.

When he landed with his wife safely in his arms, her put her down and went running to Amanda. His wife, behind him, yelled shrilly to Geraldo, who emerged toting a rather fearsome automatic machine gun.

A bullet magically popped into Geraldo's forehead – Foss was out in full daylight, being totally crazy as always.

Jessi jumped out the same window Kyle had broken, and raced to his wife's apparent aid, which she gratefully accepted. But then Kyle heard his wife's shrill yell once more and saw Jessi's fingers poking into her eyes, and sparks making her raven hair stand on end. His wife would now most certainly be blind instead of deaf, or was Jessi going to make her a deaf mute so she couldn't properly describe what had happened to Geraldo and to her new husband?

Would she not have to cut off her hands? She was most proficient in sign language and with her hands in general. Kyle bit his lower lip raw till it bled.

Kyle, torn between his wife and Amanda, chose Amanda. At least she'd never lied to him like his wife had. He blocked out the crackling noises of frying brains and ripped the door right off the car. As he snapped the seatbelt in two he smelled the smallest hint of gasoline.

With renewed enthusiasm he picked Amanda up and started running. The explosion had been fierce but thankfully the few pieces of shrapnel that went his way missed them both. He stopped by Jessi, panting hard.

His wife lay on the ground motionless.

"You killed her?" he asked Jessi.

"I did," interjected Foss. "Jessi was only going to make her blind and deaf but she would have left her hands alone. We couldn't have her tell them you were still alive." He turned to Jessi. "Can you use the rock over there to smash the right front bumper of the limo?"

"To make it look like a bad accident?" Jessi asked with glee.

Foss's steel gaze turned to him. "And you Kyle, will play dead in the limo for the media."

***

Over the next three months, the mob conducted their investigation. They'd been all over the scene with Detective Foss from the Seattle Police Department. Foss had been lucky enough to take pictures of the inside of the limo before it had blown up. In his pictures it was already clear that the engine had caught fire from the collision and that everyone was most certainly dead from the impact.

Not one of the three occupants had worn their seatbelt.

Kid Lager was dead. The genius medical student had had a terrible past, where both his parents – his only family – had passed away while under his care. He'd been trying to extend their lives to 200 years when they both developed complications, dying shortly thereafter. It appeared there was a fatal flaw in the journals the good detective had found. Somehow the genius had calculated 2+8 as 2 to the power of 8. Correcting the error showed that it was in fact impossible to extend life in the manner he'd chosen without killing the patient first.

Unfortunately, full of grief, Kid Lager had latched on to the Trager family because he'd discovered a boy named Kyle there and it fit closely enough to Kid Lager that he'd not only performed cosmetic surgery on himself to look almost exactly like the boy but he'd then kidnapped him and housed him in his basement in manacles. The boy was found alive but only barely, and severely traumatized by rats and mice.

The only dead giveaway had been Kid Lager's voice. Kyle Trager's voice was higher pitched, as though he'd never had puberty change the sound of his voice.

***

Jessi handed Kyle the potatoes he'd asked for in his new squeaky voice. She couldn't suppress a broad smile. The rest of the family thought he'd caught a disease that permanently damaged his vocal cords. He'd recovered quickly from the illness but the damage had already been done.

Amanda had gone to a convent and had become a nun – even though she didn't remember many details of why Kyle's voice changed, it looked like she perfectly remembered the fact he was now a widow. Because of this, she'd been heartbroken and in a fit of righteousness, she'd declared, "If I can't marry you, I'll marry no one."

It hadn't been difficult to change his voice of course, but it was humiliating.

Even though it hurt to no longer have Amanda around to tempt him with sweet innocence, he knew he was far from innocent anymore. His late wife had been a gymnast and had had a nasty bit of imagination.

Kyle smiled broadly as he chewed his potatoes.

At least he had his memories.


End file.
